The Cold Commands (66 page)

Out on the marsh
, says the first voice, the boy.
Salt in the wind
.

He feels a fresh pulse beating in his throat. He stares about him, at the sacrificed and the weeping abandoned, gathered in their tens of thousands.

You’d better run
, says the second voice, but he knows, with sudden warm assurance, that the warning is not for him. He can feel a strength growing in his hands like iron tools and the cold is burning off him now, replaced by furnace glow within. He looks at Hjel and sees, in the shadow of the hat brim, the tight grin still on the scavenger prince’s face.

Very distantly, he thinks he hears Seethlaw howl.

His lip curls off his teeth, as if in answer.

Do I look like a fucking slave to you?
the third voice asks.

Ringil’s face twists. A muscle in his cheek jumps. He breathes in deeply, out again, and a fresh wind seems to pick up across the plain of weeping, screaming souls. When he speaks, his voice still husks, but there’s a rasp in it now, an ugly edge of purpose.

“Where’s my sword?”

HJEL OPENS THE MARSH WITH THE MANDOLIN, A LONG, SCRAPING
chord played out, and the ground seems to funnel away at their feet, a cleft opening, white limestone buttresses backing aside, and a pale path downward. Hjel makes it happen with the same casual gesture and lack of ceremony of a man drawing back a curtain to let in the morning light.

“This way,” he says, gesturing for Ringil to go first.

The path winds down the cleft, water snaking and trickling on the pallid stone on either side, soaking into moss along the cracks and into the clumped grass that lines the base of the rock. There’s a cool, damp scent on the air, but it’s not unpleasant, and the ground under Ringil’s feet is dry; it crunches with every step taken. He is getting somewhere. Hjel is at his back in grim escort, and the walls of the cleft are opening out. A cycle has been broken, somehow, inside him as much as out, and now he walks clear of its shards.

The path emerges in gloom at the bottom of a long, luminous cliff that stretches out of sight to left and right. Ringil has already noticed that for the last few yards of the cleft path, the fissured blocks of limestone on either side have been carved with line upon densely packed line of characters in an alphabet he cannot read, but whose form is hauntingly familiar. Now he tips his head back and sees that the entire vast face of the cliff above him and on either side is worked in the same tireless, angular scrawl, over every inch of its surface.

Hjel stands at his shoulder as he stares upward.

“The
ikinri ’ska
,” he says simply. “All of it. Preserved, by the Originators, by those who first wrote it down, for all and any who can find their way here, and still have the will to learn. You go that way.”

He nods ahead. The path leads out from the cliff to a broad, cold-looking tarn. Light scuff of a breeze across the silvered surface and through the reeds that fringe its shore, but otherwise the water looks dead. Gil hesitates. This is a lot like one of the places Seethlaw walked him through before things went bad. He looks in vain for a way to cross.

“So how am I supposed to do this?”

Hjel points past him at the water. “You wanted your sword. Call for it.”

“
Call
for it?”

“Yes.”

Ringil looks at him for a moment, sees the ragged prince is in earnest. He shrugs.

“All right.”

He walks down to the edge of the water. Tiny waves lap on mud at the toes of his boots. He stares out at the tarn, baffled.

“Call for it!” Hjel calls to him. He has not moved from the cleft in the cliff. He stands, slim and dark against the vast luminous array of the carved
ikinri ’ska
.

Ringil shrugs again, feeling stupid. “Ravensfriend?”

“Louder!”

Gil lifts his hands theatrically. Pitches his voice out across the tarn. “I’ve come for the Ravensfriend!”

A dozen yards offshore, the water boils and then explodes. A wet, webbed hand is extended and in it is the sword, gripped firmly about the blade. Ringil stares at it, then looks back at Hjel. The scavenger prince gestures.

“Well, go on then. You want it? Go and get it.”

He wades into the water, finds himself waist-deep surprisingly fast. The mud on the bottom sucks at his boots, stirs up thick and smoky brown from each step he takes. When he gets to where the sword is held up, he looks down and he can see the akyia lying beneath the surface, like some nightmare odalisque reclining on a harem couch. Its long, fin-fronded limbs coil idly about, keeping station; its breasts float full and buoyant on the big, smoothly muscled body. The huge lamprey mouth irises open and shut in the boneless lower face, tasting the muddied swirl his passage has made. He can see the serried ranks of spines within raise up and then lie down again in the throat. In the wrenched bone structure of the upper face, the fist-sized eyes gaze blankly up at him, no more life-like than those of some sunken statue.

After all he’s been through, it’s like seeing an old, much-loved friend. He’d reach down to stroke the creature if he thought it wouldn’t take his hand off at the wrist.

He reaches out instead, takes the sword in both hands. The akyia lets go of the blade and rolls over, shows him one thick muscled flank and
then sinks again, coils once rapidly about his legs, and is gone in a thrashing of fins and an explosion of spray that drenches him.

He wades back to shore, dripping and clutching the Ravensfriend to him in both hands, as if he’s forgotten what it’s for.

But he hasn’t.

And Hjel is gone.

Only the towering edifice of the
ikinri ’ska
remains.

n the temple at Afa’marag, Risgillen bent over the young boy and placed a calming hand on his brow. The panic in his eyes soaked away at her touch. She leaned close, whispered in his ear, the old, old forms.

She knew he wouldn’t understand, none of them did in this cursed modern age they were fighting to claw back. But it was the best she could do. Honor the rituals, honor the blood, honor the living past. She knew no other way to live. She hoped that at least something in the boy, some thin thread of heritage brought down the long years, would find its way to the old significances and understand the service he rendered, the honor she bestowed.

“Blood of my blood, ties of mine,” she murmured. “Know your worth, and give us the strength, of ancestors shared and stored away.”

She slid her sharpened thumb talon down the length of his arm, opened the artery from elbow crook to wrist. He made a soft, hopeless
noise as the blood rushed out. She hushed him and moved to the other arm. Found the artery, saw it through the flesh and sliced it open.

“Blood of my blood, ties of mine. Know your worth, and open the way for us now.”

The second blood vessel gave up its contents. The boy moved a little on the altar, whimpering as he bled out, but she kept a firm hand pressed on his chest, lending him her calm. The blood pooled and snaked about on the worn stone where he lay. Risgillen watched the patterns it made with a critical eye, compared them with the old stains already marking the stone. She glanced down the hallway at the gathered glirsht statues, reached in among them, reached
past
them at angles the eye could not see. She frowned.

“Well?”

Atalmire, from up in the gallery, flanked by two of his honor guard and that idiot priest. Like most storm-callers, he was impatient at the best of times. She supposed it went with mastery of the Talons of the Sun, the glitter-swift elemental forces you had to command. Bound to make you twitchy, something like that.

She shook her head.

“Something’s not right,” she called up to them.

“Well
—what?
”

“If I knew that, it wouldn’t be a problem.” She gave her attention back to the dying boy, smiled absently at him. Stroked his face. “There’s something blocking the flow of force here. Sacrifice goes unrecognized.”

Atalmire kicked at the gallery rail in frustration. “Is this the fucking
Ahn Foi
backing up on us again?”

“That was many thousand years ago, Atalmire. I think it’s fair to say they learned their lesson back then. In any case, this is not them, it doesn’t
taste
of them. This is something—”

—else
.

Like a whisper in the dusty gloom.

Her eyes flickered back to the glirsht statues and the space they stood around. She frowned. A small wind had sprung out of nowhere, lifting dust and detritus in a low spiral for a moment, then letting them fall. She stared at the dust, puzzled. It was not her doing, and she didn’t think any of the invoked powers were—

“Just a moment.”

Atalmire grunted and turned to speak to Menkarak, who was gibbering at him in Tethanne. Risgillen had no idea what they were talking about, and cared less. Bad enough she’d had to master the bastardized remnants of the Old Tongue they spoke in the north, she wasn’t going to learn this arid pigshit rattle as well. Let Atalmire govern the cat’s-paw down here, let Atalmire call down the Talons of the Sun on this sun-seared desert hell, take credit for it and rule what was left if he liked. Her place was in the north, preparing her brother’s dream of return.

She placed one hand in the puddling blood on the altar at the boy’s side, kept the other in place on his shivering chest. Felt for the shape of the blockage.

“Haste will not serve here,” she called up to Atalmire, breaking up his conversation with the priest. “This cousin’s blood points away from acting now, and so did the last three. Unless we discover why, we risk destroying everything you’ve worked for.”

Atalmire raised a hand to silence Menkarak and leaned down on the gallery rail. “If we wait much longer, my lady, we risk the palace coming down on Afa’marag, and we will lose our gateway.”

“They won’t do that until Ringil’s three days are up.” Risgillen grimaced, reaching again. She could pull no clarity from the mess of resonances the blood offering sent echoing out into the Gray Places. In the last several thousand years of scrying, she could not recall seeing anything like this. “And they may not even act then. The Emperor is cautious in his dealings with the Citadel, he has affairs of state to balance.”

“Our sources say he is convinced of what the Dragonbane has said.”

Risgillen shook her head in irritation. “Our sources say he will not risk all-out war with the Citadel until all other avenues have been explored. That gives us time. At worst, it gives us time to abandon Afa’marag, withdraw, and find another location.”

“That would be a disastrous setback.”

“Oh, don’t be so histrionic.” Risgillen lowered her head to the boy’s chest, listened to the sagging beat of his heart. She frowned again. “It
may cost us a year or two. Your pet priest up there is not the only pry-point we have. The Citadel is replete with useful idiots like him. But I’ll tell you this much for certain, Atalmire—you bring the Talons of the Sun through here without the correct opening rituals, you risk the wrath of the Origin. And that may set us back another thousand years or more.”

“Some of us would take that risk,” Atalmire growled.

“Yes.” Her attention jerked back up to the balcony, she stared at the other dwenda with open disdain. “And that alone demonstrates how far we have fallen. Now shut up and let me—”

Smashed bright, lightning flash glimpse
—it stormed her behind the eyes
—a wind howls across the marsh plain, tearing out the roots of the exemplars, tossing them about, closing their sentinel eyes. Something gathers them in …

Something whose form she’s touched before
.

She snatched her hand out of the blood, spun about. The small winding dust devil was back, turning in the space between the statues. Rising now, lifting dust and spider corpse husks, holding it all up, knee height, waist height, chest height and—

Atalmire, for all his impatience, was attuned as any Aldrain noble. His eyes snapped to the dust devil, then back to her. He gestured. “What the fuck is that supposed to be?”

“Something’s coming,” she whispered.

The boy thrashed suddenly under her hand. Her hold on him slipped—he tried to sit up. Eyes ripped wide with knowledge of what she’d done to him. Mouth writhing to form words, a protest, a plea, a curse.

Something howled. Something roared. Something tore the air apart. “Something’s coming!” She yelled it now, into the teeth of the gale pouring out of the rent the tornado had made. “Get your men down h—”

Her voice died.

At the heart of the rising coil of dust, a black-clad figure. Black Scourge steel in hand.

No, that’s not possible
. It screamed in her head.
It cannot be. He, the blade, we
sank
it, he is
gone,
he is not—

The figure lifted its head. Grinned at her. Raised the sword.

“Risgillen! Your brother calls for you!”

Chill shivered through her. Her own blade was on her back, bound in threads of blue light and her own will. She snatched it free and stormed down the hall toward him. Faintly, she was aware of Atalmire’s honor guard leaping down from the gallery, joining her on the temple floor. Only two, but it should be enough. A fierce rage pulsed in her chest, put talons on every finger and drew her fangs down into her swelling mouth.

If Ringil noticed any of it, he gave her no sign. He came to meet her, grinning, out of the gathered glirsht statues and the storm he’d somehow conjured at their center, measured pace and vacant eyes and the empty will to harm.

She snarled and hurled a melting across the space between them.

Something she could barely see, something that wrapped around him like a loose gray shawl
reached out
and slapped the melting away. She was not even sure if he was aware it happened. But she heard the low moaning it made.

The Cold Commands
.

Her hate stumbled, stubbed senses on what she’d just seen. Shocked disbelief dizzied through her.
No mortal since Ilwrack could …